Tag Archives: high street

Jimbo & Fisher are back with Ep.12 of the WOWS Podcast and as its Black Friday this episode is on sale and will cost you nothing at all other than 35 minutes of your time (this is the same as usual so its quite accurately like a Black Friday bogus offer) but there will be cheap chat and bargain bucket jokes thrown in for nowt.

You can listen and subscribe to the WOWS Podcast on your favourite podcast services.

There wasn’t a huge amount of feedback on yesterday’s ‘blog, although I was pleased to see that it got two ‘likes’ – which is two more likes than Oscar Pistorius has legs; and is two more likes than there are people who believe Oscar Pistorius is in any way innocent.

No doubt, the truth will come out during his trial. But in the meantime, we should all speculate – no-one really knows what happened; but the more people guess, then the higher the probability that someone will guess exactly what happened. So keep speculating, what harm could it possibly do?

Anyhow, it’s time to move onto today’s topic. Having previously written about the depressed state of the UK retail market and also written about the cold weather, I though I should try something new… and write about the effect of the cold weather on the UK retail market…

Apparently the cold weather has meant that retail sales were down by 0.6% in January 2013 compared to December 2012 – although that could be readily explained by Elton John going on holiday abroad and thus not buying any flowers all month. Those figures were produced by the Office for National Statistics – who then went on to say that 64% of what they produce is a complete load of bollocks, which ironically is one of the few non-bollocks statements that they’ve produced.

The 0.6% decrease is said to have been caused by the heavy snowfall and it comes not too long after the decline in sales due to the hot weather, so perhaps there must be some kind of placid optimal temperature to go shopping indoors?

Notably though, it did say that larger shops were selling more than smaller shops – which is probably because the larger shops are larger than the smaller shops and therefore have more overpriced tat in them for people to buy.

It was also said that food sales slipped although I can’t really imagine that this will be a major problem as in spite of the current economic hardships, it’s unlikely that there would be people who would eventually stop buying food – surely eating a Findus 100% horse lasagne would be preferable to eating nothing at all and even eating a Greggs sausage roll would be better than eating nothing… well maybe not…

Perhaps the main cause of the downturn in retail sales is the gentrification of the High Street, which eviscerates and stifles originality – a bit like the X Factor.

It was also said that 10.1% of retail spending took place online although that excluded fuel, although quite who buys petrol via their computer is beyond me… it would certainly wreak havoc with the PC’s firewall…